Origins of Universe on the Big Screen

Dramatic 3D videos, created from actual data by Stanford University physicists at SLAC's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, show the origins of the universe. The first step in making a KIPAC visualization is a numerical simulation, an iterative series of physics calculations – often performed on a supercomputer, that determines the composition, distribution, temperature and other properties of matter on a cosmic scale. Visualization Lab Manager Ralf Kaehler then uses rendering techniques, many of which he developed himself, to convert the simulation results into the series of images that becomes the video.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] Stanford University here at kipac we use supercomputers to recreate events in the universe we work on the very first Stars the very first super noi the very first magnetic fields the fundamental thing is to understand why the universe looks the way it looks how did these structures

00:00:28 evolve over time where do they come from the clips that we produce are only about a minute long and so they appear very Dynamic but the time that they represent is the entire age of the Universe I think these clips are very [Music] beautiful we're using two HD projectors two projector stereoscopic animations to watch 3D visualizations of these

00:00:53 numerical simulations it's often much easier for humans to look at images instead of looking at Large amounts of [Music] numbers we work on a variety of subjects quite a bit on the very first objects in the universe for a long time we didn't know what that was is it stars black holes or a bunch of planets perhaps even we just used our models started at the

00:01:19 Big Bang evolved It Forward in time actually found that it's massive stars we've also worked on how galaxies themselves come up about and there we follow really tens and hundreds of galaxies as they first form and then fall together to make ever larger and larger [Music] galaxies we also produced a

00:01:45 visualization that shows how the first galaxies interacted with the surrounding gas in terms of re iiz it heating up the gas between the [Music] galaxies we try to predict the past [Music] it's a lot of fun to get images as a result of my work at the end of the day an animation of something about the

00:02:11 earliest history of the universe for more please visit us at stanford.edu